I consider myself lucky. I am 40 years old, a woman of color, and I have never had a terrible experience with police officers. I also consider myself lucky because I live in Harlem, NYC, and live with the safety net created by some of the world's finest first responders.

But the older I get, the more I see and understand that for too many Americans, including family members, including neighbors, police presence has long felt like occupation. And with the rapid militarization of America's police, an experience once reserved for those in ghettos is now available to anyone caught in the wrong place at the wrong time in cities, suburbs, and rural areas across the country.

After Mike Brown's killing and the subsequent non-indictment, and Feminista Jones's call for a national moment of silence over the summer, I attended my first anti-police brutality protest. I was nervous --I'd never protested the police before. But when I arrived at the park -- along with a few hundred other extremely peaceful protesters -- I was reassured by the professional and calm response by NYPD. Protesters had their say. No one became violent. And that was that. On the same night, protests led by multiple groups in Union Square would march down avenues and shut down Times Square. And for weeks, #BlackLivesMatter and #ICantBreathe protests and die-ins would continue, sometimes dramatically shutting down highways and disrupting commuters' and shoppers' holiday routines. When NYPD officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were so horribly killed, they were murdered by a lone actor, not as part of anyone's movement as too many were quick to accuse.

The vast majority of protesters wanted peace, acted in peace. I know of no protests in these past months that would have necessitated a long gun reaction from police, presuming the police intent was to deescalate and not instigate. So many of us watched the Ferguson protests, and asked, our hearts open and hurting: why would the police respond with such hatred? Why couldn't they come in peace? Or, at least with the professionalism of most of NYPD?

So I find myself deeply troubled by Commissioner Bratton's announcement that NYPD has formed the Strategic Response Group, a 350 officer unit that is: "designed for dealing with events like our recent protests, or incidents like Mumbai or what just happened in Paris."

Commissioner Bratton lumped together the recent anti-police brutality protests with terrorist acts of murder. If one asks, how could he possibly do it? I suppose the answer lies in these two words: "disorder control." No matter that these recent protests were to say that black people are human beings, too, undeserving of systematic brutality, no matter that millions of Americans of every hue and background rose up to agree, he used those two words as more justification for the force that will have "extra heavy protective gear, with the long rifles and machine guns -- unfortunately necessary in these instances."

But when exactly were they necessary in these past months? Are we to conclude that the best and brightest at NYPD watched the Ferguson response and their takeaway was not disgust, but we need to be more like them?

I have never been someone to decry or dismiss NYPD as an organization. I know there are so many strong and good police officers who have a very difficult job to do and do it well, and when put in gray situations, do the best they can. Also, I find hope in the policing change that encourages more community engagement by police on their beats. But I can't help but be alarmed by the hyper-militarization of our police force. By policies that put so much trust in enhanced firepower.

In a recent post, I asked both Commissioner Bratton and Mayor Bill de Blasio to consider going the Toronto Police Department route and declaring that from now on, the new paradigm would be zero deaths. That as an agency, they would work to preserve human life when possible. That as an agency that runs on stats, this would become the stat above all stats.

Are these two words -- zero deaths - just too radical to be spoken aloud in America?

There is still time to listen to the people of New York City who are saying enough is enough. We want common sense. Not overwhelming force.]]>When the Answer Becomes 'Start Your Own School': An Interview With Harlem's Voyka Sototag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2015:/theblog//3.65745022015-01-29T16:43:37-05:002015-01-29T20:59:01-05:00Stacy Parker Le Mellehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-parker-aab/
Everyone wants a strong neighborhood option. But what if you live in Harlem, in District 5, whose schools have not historically performed as well as in other districts? What are you going to do?

I spoke with Soto about Harlem's educational landscape and how she organized other educators and parents to create an IB framework charter school, Sofara International. We also spoke about racial and socioeconomic isolation for students and the difficulty she's faced to charter Sofara International. Soto envisions the day when all Harlem children can stay in their neighborhood to receive a first-class education. So must we all.

How would you describe Harlem's educational landscape?

From the perspectives of an educator, a former UFT chapter leader, a Harlem resident and mother of elementary aged children, schooling in Harlem is wanting. Currently, Harlem, from 96th Street to 155th Street, has a fair amount of diversity in K-8 schools. I can see in the near future Harlem being the "place to go for school choice." We have everything from magnet schools to charter schools. With that said, however, there are just not enough options in quality innovative schools. Administrators have to understand that even with the best programs, parents talk, parents make unannounced visits, parents investigate.

We know when there is high teacher turnover; underexperienced and undersupported teachers; overbearing, inexperienced administrators who care more about their egos than our community children; high rates of English-language learners not being serviced properly; high rates of students with disabilities with no direct programming to meet their needs; and school pass rates on state tests at some schools in the single digits. We also see yearly school surveys are taken, but no action to address issues is made at the school level. We are waiting for someone to truly look at our populations and individual schools and determine what they need.

I give thumbs up to Chancellor Farina for committing to having some Harlem schools receive additional services. Shameful, though, is the idea that best practices in a high-performing school should be transplanted to an underperforming school. While one or two practices can be transplanted, the rest should be innovative, relevant, and tailored to the needs of that one school community, but they're not. The pressure to "move" kids often leads to cutting corners and cheating students of their right to a fair and equitable education.

So, as a result of all these things, half of our parents choose traditional public or charter schools and half, those savvy enough to parlay an opportunity or have a few cents to rub together, put their children in private/parochial schools. Therefore, we not only have racial isolation in schools but socioeconomic as well.

How would you describe Harlem's educational landscape vis-a-vis the rest of New York City?

As compared to New York City, Harlem is an island unto itself, educationally. A few blocks down and the landscape of schools begins to change. Demographics change, and therefore the academic experience changes. We all read the report about NYC being the most segregated school district in the country. So, again, schools are restricted along the lines of race and economics. No one has been brave enough to revamp the DOE district lines.

At the same time, charter networks are carving out territory on the left, and everyone else on the right. Co-locations seem to be the biggest issue. Truth be told, the Bloomberg administration reorganized all of the city's large schools into smaller ones. So, while charters are co-locating, you can also find buildings where two and three traditional public schools are co-locating. For the Sofara team, a grassroots group of Harlem parents, we see charters as a great opportunity. We see the addition of Sofara International Charter School as a game changer for Harlem.

Right now, is it possible to get a great public education in Harlem?

I have experience with both traditional public and charter public schools. Good, possibly. Great? Only if you're lucky.

Sofara may never have been conceptualized if it was possible to have a great public education in Harlem. The parents who gathered to ask our local elected official for help with their school two years ago didn't think so. The parents who came together to do the research, visit high-quality schools, and create the foundation for Sofara don't believe so. The parents who cross district lines for a school don't think so. The parents enrolling their children in private schools don't think so. The parents homeschooling don't think so. The new families that you see getting on the trains in the morning to travel to downtown schools don't think so. The thousands of parents on charter-school wait lists looking for a better opportunity don't think so.

Luckily I have my two sons in a great public school in Harlem, but still out of district for us. I can tell some really sordid parent tales that include principal retaliation, changing IEP mandates without permission and so much more.

Describe your dream public school. Is this school possible in New York City? In Harlem?

The Sofara team has designed the dream school, and we are ready to do what it takes to see it realized. Our mission and vision are very clear. Outside of Sofara, I'm just not convinced. We are looking at the here and now as well as the future needs of our children. An international model is necessary because we are already living in a global economy. Harlem needs a school like Sofara whose students will be ready to meet global demands. We provide progressive models molded to fit our children. We are proving what all parents dream of in a school. Our emphasis is on nurturing and building, not on molding or homogenizing. That way we are not just talking about closing the achievement gap. We are building capacity and setting expectations of excellence. This is what progressive education can look like.

Programs and best practices and all the money in the world can't make a dream school. A visionary leader willing to advocate, innovate, support, and inspire; teachers and faculty that are supported, valued and allowed to take risks to facilitate student learning; a core education plan that addresses the needs and skill set necessary for the life our children will lead; and a school environment that considers sensory input is what creates a dream school.

Tell us about your background in education.

I'm an international educator with a master's in international curriculum and instruction from the Foreign Affairs Spouses Teacher Training Program. I have taught internationally and domestically but always with special-needs or high-needs populations. I have always worked in leadership roles to develop and pilot programs, develop and improve school departments, and create new school plans and was fortunate to have been part of the founding of an international school for special-needs children. I've been a lead teacher, committee chair several times, and worked on systemic reform at two schools, both of which were working toward accreditation. Fortunately for Harlem and Sofara, I also happen to hold an International Baccalaureate Organization certification in teaching and learning, making me uniquely qualified to start up a school such as Sofara International.

Tell us about Sofara International. How did you know it was time to create a new school?

Given the experiences we had as parents, we knew we had to do something for our children. The parents with boys seemed to be the most concerned. The climate we live in now is aggressive. Stop and frisk. Skittles and hoodies. "Hands up; don't shoot." "Black lives matter." Elementary-to-prison pipeline. It's scary. Sofara represents parents taking a sincere interest in their children's future and controlling our own destiny, so to speak. We don't want to be in the crosshairs of a political war. We don't want others telling us what's good enough for our children. For us, the achievement gap represents opportunity and experience gaps that are not being addressed in our local schools. We decided the Band-aid solution wasn't for us; instead, we wanted to get at the root of the problem.

With this in our minds, Sofara International Charter School was planned with the needs of the community in mind rather than planning a charter and plopping it down in the community and trying to get kids in the door. From the parents on the front lines to the three different community boards that encompass District 5, Harlem is resolute that it wants foreign-language, global-minded education, STEM, and real-world experiences for our schools. Sofara has designed its educational program to encompass each of these within an international context that incorporates a global perspective. We have done this through the inquiry-led International Baccalaureate framework that allows students to apply what they are learning in a natural, real-world way. Even the foreign-language program to be implemented was chosen to meet this purpose, as it teaches through the content rather than as an isolated subject. Sofara International is the dream school, and it will be free.

Why the IB framework? How is it superior to other approaches?

The IB framework is like no other. Many confuse it as being a curriculum, but it's not. IB started with the Diploma Program (DP) at the high-school level as a way to prepare students for college, and it has become world-renowned and sought-after by college-admissions panels. The IBO now has four extremely well-developed programs of study. After the DP was created, the IBO looked at how to even better prepare students by looking at what middle school students would need to make the DP experience even more powerful. The same was done when it came to creating the elementary-school program. Now a second high-school program has been added that enables students to truly take hold of their destiny and be prepared for the real world. What parent doesn't want this type of continuum of consistent, rigorous, quality education? Our children will have free-flowing discovery and experiential learning, communication skills that include foreign languages, real-world application of the skills learned, the development of successful leadership habits of mind, and the ability to be real leaders in the globalized world they will be a part of. The IB speaks to all of this.

What obstacles have you faced as you've tried to open this school?

Sofara has been its own main obstacle. Our programming is apparently so rigorous and progressive that we have been asked, "How will these kids be able to..." We were born out of the needs of the community, so Sofara can seem like an alien force compared to the cookie-cutter, replication mindset. An innovative approach to teaching and learning through an international focus is rare in public education, so helping the authorizers feel safe with what we are about to do is our biggest challenge. For example, in designing Sofara, we looked at what skills and habits are needed to be successful in the leading emerging domestic and world markets and looking at what will keep our children on the cutting edge of industry opportunities. That's a hard concept to swallow when the only thing that comes to mind about our children is that they can't read and write. We're not about the deficit approach to education. We're more of the bootstrap, "Yes we can" approach. We're about instilling the success-driven habits of mind.

Other than being our own obstacle, as an independent "player" in the charter school game, it has been difficult to get respect, so to speak. We have certainly been recognized and acknowledged, but we are kind of the David in the room of Goliaths who no one takes seriously. To boot, the networks and replications are safe, whereas Sofara is a game changer. This is not stopping us, though. We just keep looking for ways around the obstacles.

What are the advantages of charter schools? The disadvantages?

Opportunity. Harlemites care as much as any parent about their children's education, and charters represent a level of choice that wasn't there before for our community and the city. There are thousands of children on the waitlists to our charters, trying to gain better opportunities. More importantly, there is the opportunity we have in deciding what type of schools we want in our community. Instead of fighting co-locations and demonizing charters, I'd like to see people get behind us and help us lobby for the types of programs we want and need. Let's ensure innovation.

On the flip side, many, including myself, worry about the elementary-to-prison pipeline continuing through the charter schools. Little districts unto themselves are being created without enough independent school choices beside them such as Sofara. So our choices are becoming network schools or public schools. Also, when there is an issue at a charter, we need authorizers holding charters accountable sooner rather than later. In Harlem we hear stories of everything from padded rooms to embezzlement. Ultimately, understanding a school's philosophy around engagement and discipline is key before enrolling your child.

Have you always been a proponent of charter schools? If not, what changed your mind?

No, I wasn't always a proponent of charter schools. However, I have always been a proponent of high-quality education. I have witnessed indifferent and apathetic administrators and teachers who don't care enough to effect any change, instill any rigor, or have any desire to push children forward in life. As a UFT chapter leader I witnessed and experienced the ugly side. Once I decided that I was sick and tired of being sick and tired, to quote Ms. Hamer, I looked for a solution. It wasn't a difficult choice. Starting a charter school would allow the bonds and chains of a repressive system to be broken and to make something of the futures of our children. I wish some of the biggest naysayers would try it as well. Break free and innovate.

How would you assess the charter-school landscape in New York City? What is working? What is not?

I have a limited view as a candidate seeking authorization. We do know that holding students to high expectations is working. Having a clear vision and focused mission for schools is working. Exposing students to the world beyond their own, including the collegiate one, is working. Adding back extracurricular activities and artistic programs is working by increasing academic progress and student motivation. Letting go of the farming school schedule has also had its benefits. Ultimately, though, allowing educational visionaries to actually innovate, without fear, and get a school going that adds depth to our educational landscape is what's working!

As an industry, however, oversight must be active no matter how autonomous charters were meant to be. You can put programs in place and get high test scores without doing much for the children you are serving. Asking charter schools to continue to innovate to meet the changing needs of students based on the changing needs of our city or country or world would be fantastic. That is the true test of success. What are our children really able to do or become in the real world based on the education they're getting?

Would you open Sofara International as an independent school?

The short answer is absolutely. We want to build a superior-quality international school that will enrich the lives of our students, families, and community. It is needed, and it is time. However, neither I nor the Sofara team want to do that. We truly designed Sofara with all the community children in mind and want a school that's accessible to everyone; otherwise we are no different than the elite private schools. The majority of our families can't spare the $40,000-per-year price tag for a wall-to-wall International Baccalaureate school education. Yet they deserve one.

So what happens next?

The Sofara Team is moving forward toward authorization. We are considering the feedback we received from NYSED, tweaking our design plans and building greater capacity to deliver on our promises. We are growing our network and resources and will continue to work with NYSED. For us there is no turning back. We are ready to build a next-generation 4D school, and we will find a way to make it happen. I invite everyone to join the movement!]]>Two Words That Could Save NYPD -- and Ustag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.62710842014-12-04T14:41:28-05:002015-02-03T05:59:02-05:00Stacy Parker Le Mellehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-parker-aab/

Zero deaths.

Mr. Mayor, Mr. Commissioner, you have the power to say that from now on, our goal as a police force is to be responsible for zero deaths in New York City.

That doesn't mean there won't be deaths. But for a police force that keeps stats on every infraction, felony, in every precinct, you can put one stat above others: How many lives did we end this year? And if you do this, if you try, you will get to the day when you can proudly announce the number is zero.

I suggest to you, Mr. Police Commissioner, that you sit with your leadership, that you bring your force together, and say, we now have a new day at NYPD. We can't continue this way. More force does not equal more control. The lethal force and rapid militarization of our police may make cops feel stronger, but the result is that the people you are supposed to protect feel more threatened, more pushed to resist, to do what only last year would have been unthinkable: block the highways, bridges, and tunnels of our city. The more the city chokes its people, the more the people will choke the city. This is the cycle of force. Keep pushing, and people must push back. And right now, so many are making like the mighty Bayard Rustin and putting their bodies in the way. They are acting to gum a machine that shows no regard for their human lives. You can make like Rustin by being the protectors we need: those with enough love for humanity to at least to try to not kill people.

Zero deaths. I believe these two words can create the shift you desperately need right now. But they must be backed by a true commitment to culture change. New York City will not stand for an occupation force ethos. You have so many good officers and leaders in your ranks. Give them the chance to be the best peace officers in the world.]]>Learning from Bayard Rustin in Harlem and Beyond: An Interview with Filmmaker Bennett Singertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.62381742014-11-28T17:00:02-05:002015-01-28T05:59:02-05:00Stacy Parker Le Mellehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-parker-aab/

We are all one, and if we don't know it, we will learn it the hard way. - Bayard Rustin

A few days have passed since the Ferguson non-indictment, making clear how much past is not even past. I think about Bayard Rustin, and how he would advise all of us right now.

Let me ask: are you thinking Rustin who? If you are, that's OK. That would have been me, too, until recently. I am embarrassed to say that only once I learned of the documentary Brother Outsider: The Life of Bayard Rustin, did I learn of the human rights titan and his central role in the American civil rights struggle.

While Rustin spent decades fighting for peace and for economic justice, I'd argue that all of us should know 1) Rustin convinced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. to embrace Gandhian nonviolence; 2) Rustin was the powerhouse director of the 1963 March on Washington; and 3) because Rustin was gay, and unwilling to deny this central part of his being, he lived with fears and discrimination that oft-threatened his ability to protest and organize to the best of his ability. For too many years, adversaries could use publicity of a previous arrest on a "morals" charge as blackmail.

But if Rustin was afraid or daunted, he never showed it. He kept living his life, standing up for anyone who needed a voice. He loved Black people, but as evidenced by his global activism, he loved all people.

Why are we doing this? We are neighbors and friends united under the banner Harlem Against Violence, Homophobia, and Transphobia. We formed to resist the hate speech constantly displayed by ATLAH Missionary Church on 123rd and Lenox. For several years, they posted hateful messages towards President Barack Obama. But once they posted "Jesus Would Stone Homos" the speech was not only hateful, it was murderous--yet somehow was considered "protected" speech. We decided that instead of picketing, we would raise money for the people who are often most vulnerable to this kind of hurtful religious-based rejection--homeless LGBTQ youth. ATLAH hasn't stopped posting hateful messages. We haven't stopped resisting. So far, we have raised $15,605.

I am grateful to filmmakers Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer for sharing Bayard Rustin's profound life story in such a powerful way, and for being willing to allow us to screen the film for our fundraiser. Brother Outsider is the winner of eight best documentary awards and seven audience favorite awards. The film also won a GLAAD Media Award for Outstanding Documentary. You really want to see this film! For more about our Harlem work and fundraising, and to buy tickets to the Wed. Dec. 3 event (including incredible Broadway tickets that include backstage cast visits, courtesy of director and Harlem resident Scott Ellis) please visit our site.

Co-producer and director Bennett Singer was kind enough to submit to an interview with me, and share more about the experience of creating Brother
Outsider.

Interview with Filmmaker Bennett Singer

When did you first learn of Mr. Rustin and his work?
It was back in 1986. I had just graduated from college and had an internship at Blackside, Inc., the company that produced Eyes on the Prize (the landmark PBS series on civil rights history). One of my first tasks was to do research on the 1963 March on Washington, which Rustin organized. I had never heard of Rustin before this--but the more I read about him, the more I felt as if I had opened up a novel and met a larger-than-life character. He made such a major difference in so many movements--bringing Gandhi's tactics of nonviolence from India to America; becoming a mentor to Martin Luther King Jr.; and playing a key role in shaping the strategy and vision of the civil rights movement. And while he was doing all this, he refused to hide or apologize for his identity as a gay man.

How did you decide to make a film about Bayard Rustin?
My college friend Nancy Kates called me in 1997. She had recently gotten her Master's from the documentary program at Stanford, and she had read a book review of the first biography of Rustin, Jervis Anderson's Troubles I've Seen. Nancy asked what I thought about the idea of making a film on Rustin. I told her it was a fantastic idea, and we teamed up as co-directors. It took us five years, but we managed to get it done!

Tell us about the process of creating this documentary. Did you have any unforeseen challenges? Any great surprises--good or bad?
When we started, the big question was whether we could find enough footage to tell Rustin's story. Our researchers literally scoured the globe for images, and we wound up with material from about 100 archives in Africa, India, Europe, Canada and the U.S.--including footage of Rustin playing football as a high school student in West Chester, Pennsylvania, circa 1929! We were also really fortunate that Rustin, who was a music major in college, recorded two albums of spirituals (available on CD at www.rustin.org). We used his singing extensively in the film, and the lyrics of songs like "Scandalize My Name" and "Lonesome Valley" have an uncanny way of telling his story. His singing is incredibly poignant.

If you could ensure that Americans knew one thing about Bayard Rustin, what would it be?
For decades, Rustin has been in the shadows, erased from history in large part because of his openness and honesty about being gay. But just last year, in 2013, Rustin received a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom--the highest honor a civilian can receive in the U.S. In presenting this award, President Obama described Rustin as "an unyielding activist for civil rights, dignity, and equality for all [who] fought tirelessly for marginalized communities at home and abroad. As an openly gay African American, Mr. Rustin stood at the intersection of several of the fights for equal rights." It's so heartening to see Rustin being recognized -- and to see the intersectionality that was at the heart of his life acknowledged as part of this recognition.

Are there any words or images from the film, or your research, that particularly stick with you?
Before his death in 1987, Rustin requested his FBI surveillance file under the Freedom of Information Act. About 10,000 pages arrived on his doorstep, and his life partner Walter Naegle, who appears in the film and was invaluable to the project, shared the entire file with us. We quote it throughout Brother Outsider to remind people that from the official point of view of the federal government, Rustin -- and the entire civil rights movement -- was seen as subversive and un-American. The FBI repeatedly referred to Rustin as a "known sexual pervert." I also think it's chilling to consider the kind of surveillance that was conducted on Rustin -- in which the government wiretaps and monitors a citizen who is not accused of any specific crime -- in light of the revelations that Edward Snowden made about surveillance taking place today.

As we cope with different forms of oppression and repression in 2014 America, what guidance do you think we should take from Bayard Rustin's life work?
"We are all one," says Rustin at the end of the film. Then he adds: "And if we don't know it, we will learn it the hard way." That insight about our interconnectedness was at the center of Rustin's worldview and guided all his work. It stems from his Quaker upbringing and was reinforced by the lessons he learned around the globe as an international human rights activist. And it's profoundly relevant today.

Why did you choose to work with Harlem Against Violence, Homophobia, and Transphobia?
Throughout his six decades as an activist, Rustin encountered hate and violence and racism and homophobia on a regular basis. Some of the resistance he faced came from segregationists; but some of it came from folks within the civil rights community. He was fearless in confronting his opponents and always sought to use the power of nonviolence and love to overcome prejudice and injustice. His story inspires me every single day, and I hope it will inspire activists and citizens who are working to combat fear and hatred in Harlem -- and in other places, like Ferguson, that are wracked by conflict and polarization. Like Dr. King, Rustin wasn't out to defeat his opponents; his goal was to find common ground based on our shared humanity, on the idea that "we are all one."

]]>The Power in the Palms of Our Hands: The Third Annual Literacy Across Harlem Marchtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.58469182014-09-18T22:31:24-04:002014-11-18T05:59:03-05:00Stacy Parker Le Mellehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-parker-aab/

The ask is simple: if you're in Harlem on the first of the month, #RockThoseReads. And if you're in Harlem this Saturday, September 20th, bring a book and join the march.

For the past three years, education activist Joe Rogers and his organization Total Equity Now (TEN) have worked tirelessly to spread the joy and power of reading across upper Manhattan. Through book drives, mentorship fairs, and workshops--as well as the monthly campaign for people to be literacy role models by showing off their reading material--TEN has been at the forefront of literacy efforts at the community level.

On Saturday, TEN will stage its third annual Literacy Across Harlem march. I spoke Joe Rogers to learn more about the march, his organization's work, and what advice he'd give young scholars.

What do you hope to accomplish with Saturday's march?

Like our first-day-of-every-month Literacy Across Harlem Day initiative, which encourages Harlemites "#RockThosereads--to carry reading materials publicly and proudly--the Literacy Across Harlem March is all about celebrating and promoting our community-based identities as readers and writers and sparking reading-related conversations.

Our aim is to bring together intergenerational groups of Harlemites to demonstrate our love of literacy, give the neighbors we pass a bit of food for thought, and foster relationship-building among community members who, although they live in opposite corners of our community, share a fierce love of learning. Many people talk about the importance of reading, but taking that message to the streets and parks really drives home, for both participants and onlookers, the truly awesome role that reading plays in our lives.

If, at the end of the event, participants have had a good time, forged new relationships, and recommitted to serving as reading ambassadors in Harlem, we will have done our jobs!

You're dedicating this march to author Walter Dean Myers.

Back in June, we dedicated our 2nd Annual Visit Your Harlem Library Day to Pura Belpré, the New York Public Library system's first Latina librarian and a pioneer in making sure children of color at the four Harlem libraries where she worked over the course of her career, from east to west, had access to reading materials that reflected their ethnic and cultural backgrounds as well as their community context.

Walter Dean Myers, who passed away in June, was, like Pura, a transformative author and bold advocate for children's books about people of color, in a literary world that, as Myers pointed out in a NY Times op-ed in March, largely marginalizes such books. Through brilliant storytelling, rooted in his experiences growing up in Harlem, Myers gave countless young people the invaluable gift of seeing themselves, their families, and our neighborhoods reflected in books.

Myers legacy also parallels Belpré's in that very few of Harlemites seem to know much about him and his enormous contributions. TEN decided that this year's Literacy Across Harlem March should serve as a vehicle for recognizing Harlem-based and Harlem-focused authors like Myers who inspire children and adults alike to become voracious readers and excellent writers.

Tell us about your team and your partners. Who is helping making this third march happen?

For the second year in a row, the Literacy Across Harlem March kicks off at two of our community's literacy hubs, La Casa Azul Bookstore, in East Harlem, and Sister's Uptown Bookstore, on the West Harlem-Washington Heights border. Both La Casa Azul owner Aurora Anaya-Cerda and Sister's Uptown's Janifer Wilson are themselves cultural gems; more importantly, though, they are deeply committed to helping the rest of us shine through powerful books and programming enriched with history, creativity, and a commitment to social justice.

This year, for the first time, we are very fortunate to introduce a few new Literacy Across Harlem March partners, including the three reading-friendly cafes that anchor our Literacy Across Harlem Day program: East Harlem Café, (in East Harlem, obviously), Astor Row Café (in Central Harlem) and Café One (in West Harlem). These community-minded businesses will offer participants delicious food and beverage samples as we pass their locations. These businesses are genuinely invested in the educational success of Harlem.
What have you learned by doing this work? What has surprised you most?

I can't say that it surprised me, but I am extremely grateful for and inspired by all the love that folks have shown TEN around our reading-related programming, including the Literacy Across Harlem March. So many individuals and organizations here share our vision of a Harlem in which books and reading are as cool and common as, say, the latest high-tech headphones or stylish designer bags--when our phenomenal writers and their works are as renowned amongst Harlemites as our most famous entertainers and celebrity chefs. Everyone seems to understand that marching against injustice is sometimes necessary, but that we must also march for reading and other positive activities that represent the best of who we have been, who we are, and who we will become as a community.

One thing that has surprised me, though, is the number of reading-related landmarks here in Harlem. Local authors Dr. William Seraile and Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts, both historians, sent me lists of historical sites connected to writers from the Harlem Renaissance and beyond. Did you know, for example, that Ralph Ellison, of Native Son fame, is buried in the Trinity Church Cemetery, located between 153rd and 155th Streets, on either side of Amsterdam Avenue? I didn't either, but all Literacy Across Harlem March participants will now be "in the know," as our march leaders will be pointing out some of these key spots as everyone makes their way to Marcus Garvey Park.

What words of wisdom would you share with young scholars?

Each every person you encounter, like each and every book you pick up, has something to teach you. The lesson may be simple or profound, stated or implied. It may lead you in the right direction or, if you're not careful or don't know any better, down the wrong path. Whatever you learn, though, whether in person or by interacting with a person's thoughts through their written words, always remember that the purpose of education is to prepare us to serve. The more you learn and the better you become at learning, from personal interactions or from books, serve more and serve better.

]]>UK Band Northeast Corridor Teams with Homeless American Teens to Fight Hate Speechtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.53529892014-05-19T13:48:59-04:002014-07-19T05:59:03-04:00Stacy Parker Le Mellehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-parker-aab/Nick Hampson of the band Northeast Corridor learned how Harlem parents were uniting to protest homophobic hate speech posted on the ATLAH Missionary Church sign on Lenox Avenue, he knew he must do something. Within hours, he wrote the song "Where You're Sleeping Tonight," in honor of homeless lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth, many of who are forced from their homes due to religious-based rejection.

But the 20 year-old Hampson didn't stop there. The Oxford University musicology major teamed up with the youth artists of Smash Street Boys, an American safehouse art program that helps sexually abused boys recover via art, filmmaking, photography and storytelling work. He also decided that proceeds from the sale of "Where You're Sleeping Tonight" will be donated to the Ali Forney Center, a Harlem-based nonprofit that helps homeless LGBTQ youth.

"What Nick and his band Northeast Corridor have done is very significant," said one Smash Street student artist. "They have shown us that someone, complete strangers, are willing to do more than just empathize. That is remarkable and we salute Northeast Corridor for getting involved to raise more shelter beds and services for kids in Harlem."

After hearing "Where You're Sleeping tonight," the student artists of Smash Street created a full, professional music video, with the youngest student artist being 12 years old. "Everyone [at Smash Street] played a role," said another student who remains anonymous to protect his identity. "We created the imagery and graphics, we did the editing and transferred it to a format in which it can be shown at 'No Time for Hate'."

"No Time for Hate" is the Tuesday, May 20th benefit night staged by the Harlem parents who decided that instead of directly protesting ATLAH Missionary Church and its hate speech, they would raise money for affected LGBTQ youth instead. All proceeds from "No Time for Hate" go to the Ali Forney Center. The "Where You're Sleeping Tonight" video will have its world premiere at "No Time For Hate."

As Hampson was inspired by the video response, he hopes others will be, too. "The video had me in tears," said Hampson. "There is something so unmistakably real about it. It's a reality we all know exists, but few ever actually see it. It's not that people always choose to ignore it; many are just not ready to face it. Hopefully now they might find the courage."

We are trying to reach 10,000 views by 7pm EST Tuesday, May 20th. Would you help us? You may view here. Please share widely so many will see the good work of these young artists!

To purchase "Where You're Sleeping Tonight", go here.
For more information about "No Time for Hate" and its participants, go here.

I am a Harlem parent. For the last seven years, I've lived near ATLAH Ministry, a church that has made itself notorious for posting hateful screeds against candidate-then President Obama, ones that often questioned his birthplace. The signs became so bad that the church next door was forced to post their own sign stating that they have no affiliation with ATLAH and that they support our president.

Over the years, my neighbors and I would pass the church sign and react with anger, frustration, laughter, quiet resignation. For a while, one could laugh at the fact that we had our own "Black Birther" church in Harlem. Most of us knew their congregation was small. We also knew they were hungry for attention. Local consensus seemed to be: Ignore them.

But when they posted a sign that said "Jesus Would Stone Homos," we knew we couldn't ignore ATLAH's hate speech any longer.

I am a member of a local parents' group called Harlem4Kids. We have a list serve that is often host to robust debates. We started talking about this sign: what should we do? We knew, and were warned by law enforcement and local activists alike, that doing anything to deliver ATLAH attention was giving them what they wanted.

One of our group members suggested: Instead of simply protesting, why don't we donate to a local group helping LGBTQ youth? Another group member suggested the Harlem-based Ali Forney Center, which serves homeless LGBTQ youth all over the city. So that's what we did. We started an online fundraising drive for the Ali Forney Center, named after a young gay man of color who, as he was trying to make better lives for his peers, was murdered in the streets. This incredible group is led by Carl Siciliano and helps place homeless youth in emergency and transitional beds, provides meals, and offers a whole host of medical and counseling help.

Our initial goal was modest: $1,000. We are now past $4,000 with 89 contributors.

As a capstone activity, we are staging a benefit night on Tuesday, May 20, at Maysles Cinema in Harlem. Tickets start at $25. All ticket buyers will be acknowledged in our program. Our new goal is $7,000. And we sure hope to surpass it.

The benefit night will feature a short film focused on the work of the Ali Forney Center followed by panel discussions with activists, clergy, and community members discussing the challenges faced by LGBTQ youth -- including religious rejection -- and what the community can do to help. The evening will also feature the world premiere of the video for "Where You're Sleeping Tonight" by Northeast Corridor & Real Stories Gallery Foundation, song written by Nick Hampson, music video created by Smash Street & friends. "Where you're sleeping tonight" was inspired by Harlem community actions to respond to ATLAH Ministry's hateful messaging. All sales of the song will go to support the Ali Forney Center.

Reception refreshments will be provided by Harlem restaurants Settepani and Barawine. All proceeds go to the Ali Forney Center.

According to the Ali Forney Center, every night in New York City, 3,800 young people are homeless, and 40 percent of those youth are LGBTQ. Many homeless kids have been pushed out of their homes due to religious-based rejection. Signs like ATLAH's are no joke to young, persecuted kids who've been told they're evil or less-than because of how they were born.

But to end on one beautiful note: The Harlem4Kids group is over 2,000 strong. We're a diverse lot. Often times our debates can break down along "Old Harlem" vs "New Harlem" lines. But as one of the parents wrote me and said, this was the one issue that united everyone. There can be no home for this kind of hate speech in Harlem. This is our home. And we must do what we can to make it safe for ourselves and for all or our neighbors.

#NoTimeForHate

For more information, visit our site at: http://harlemagainstviolencehomophobia.mydagsite.com/home

]]>Belonging to Wyoming, Belonging to the World: An Interview With Author Nina McConigleytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.48427282014-02-23T11:14:45-05:002014-04-25T05:59:01-04:00Stacy Parker Le Mellehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-parker-aab/

I love outsider stories, especially outsider-in-America stories -- the stories of characters that show up in places central casting would never expect them to be. Same for the stories of characters that have every right to be someplace, yet face resistance from those who fear them. Belonging and unity can be such elusive goals and many of us face aggressors who question our right to exist on an equal plane -- or our right to exist, period. I love seeing their lives made visible on the page.

But I need strong storytelling. Compelling narratives that keep me reading and pulled through with that invisible, pleasurable force. I want to be irritable if I misplace a book, or place it in the wrong bag, because I want to finish one story and begin the next.

Let me tell you: I was irritable when I temporarily misplaced Nina McConigley's short story collection Cowboys and East Indians (FiveChapters). Had at least five other books placed down open-faced and I was still trying to find her book before I had to leave the house in the morning.

McConigly, herself born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming by an Irish father and Indian mother, tells the profound stories of characters, who through birth or recent immigration, found themselves in Wyoming, or leaving Wyoming for travel abroad to India. Most of her characters in these stories are outsiders -- Indians in America, Anglo Americans or American-born Indians in India. But there is nothing predictable about their story arcs -- or, when consequences do arrive, they may have been foreseeable, but usually in hindsight, as you expect from an excellent story. And you may still be breathless from the cruelty, or profundity, of it all.

I think of the Indian wife Madhu in "Fenced Out," who loves her life back home, but her husband, competitive with the brother who is also in America, insists that she and the children join him in Wyoming. Not long after the reunion, they are in a car crash, one that renders the wife quadriplegic. The turns of this story are unexpected and haunting, especially the ending, one that illuminates and shakes our assumptions about the important geography of this story, or any story.

And I am still thinking of the white Caspar co-worker in "Pomp and Circumstances" who wants Chitra, the Indian wife of his colleague, to come to his home and go down to his basement. Not for seduction, and not to admire the taxidermy or the gun collection, but to be allowed inside the even more secret vault, the one that hides his dresses and make-up. He is a cross-dresser, and he wants to try on one of her saris. This is their secret, one that Chitra will keep. For even she knows: "This kind of thing can get you killed in Wyoming."

To be honest, I am still thinking about many of the stories in this collection -- thinking about powerful moments and the fates of characters. I decided to ask McConigly if she would speak to me more about growing up in Wyoming, about storytelling and writing, and about her sense of home, and about her Irish side (too!). As with her fiction, there is much in her biography and point of view that doesn't stick to presumed scripts.

Tell us about home. Has your sense of home shifted, or evolved, over time?

I think for a long time growing up, while I loved Wyoming, I always wanted to be somewhere bigger, I always wanted to live in a city. As an adult, I have tried to live in cities before. I always thought cities were where it was at -- museums, restaurants, music... and people. So many different kinds of people.

But over time, I have realized I am not a city person. I love the quiet. The open space. The mountains. The extremes that Wyoming presents. I am most at home when I am here. I write well, and I perhaps work harder here to have the life I envisioned when I was younger. I may live in the least populated state, but I don't feel like home is lacking. I feel so full and blessed here. Less people yes, but the people here are all a different stock. A tough astonishing group that have chosen to make a life in the American West.

You were born in Singapore, but grew up in Wyoming. What were the blessings of such an upbringing? And the pitfalls?

I grew up in a very international home. I think when you live in a rural or isolated place, if you are from somewhere else, you tend to find other outsiders. In our home, we had friends who were South American, Polish, German, French, Chinese... it was a long time before I realized this wasn't the norm. I think if I had grown up in a more urban environment, I may not have met the people I grew up with.

The pitfalls were that I didn't much ever see a reflection of myself. I was often the only brown person in the room. I am not sure this is always a bad thing, but I became acutely aware of being a bit of an outsider. And perhaps my hackles went up. I was sure I wouldn't ever date or be in the popular crowd in high school.

Do you have romantic feelings towards your father's roots? How much do you identify with his contribution to your heritage?

It's strange, as no one asks me about my Irish side. I suppose that makes sense, since I visibly look Indian. But, I actually have dual citizenship -- and I am an Irish citizen and hold an Irish passport. Growing up, I spent much more time in Ireland. And in college, I focused on Irish literature. I read all the Yeats and Joyce I could.

My Irish family are all great storytellers (such a cliché, but true!). I like to think I get the love of language and words from them. I may write about Indian things, but again, I think in many ways, my sensibilities are very Irish.

Everyone who meets my parents often are often surprised that they are a couple. That they grew up in such radically different backgrounds and make it work. I always say, not really, both my Irish and Indian families don't really like the British -- so they have that in common.

Who were the influential storytellers of your youth?

Enid Blyton, LM Montgomery, and my all time favorite, Laura Ingalls Wilder. A line of hers is the epigraph to my book -- and I will always love Wilder. She's my writing hero. I am crazy about any pioneer narratives, and in fact, I have a tattoo of a covered wagon on my back. But I love that she tells a story simply and she isn't sentimental at all. Which is something to me that is essentially very true to the American West. She tells you the crops fail, that Mary is blind, that the temperature is -50 -- and then she moves on. There is no wallowing in sorrow. She personifies the expression "Cowboy Up."

I also was a huge Archie Comic Book fan. In fact, the first thing I ever published was in an Archie comic. I designed clothes for Betty and Veronica. There was something so quintessentially All-American about Archie. And I really clung to that.

When did you first know it was important, or rewarding, to tell stories? Were you mentored early?

I always did Young Authors in school, and I have always made small books as presents for friends. But in my youth, I more read than wrote. I was a bit of a socially awkward kid, so reading was my huge escape. My mom had brought a 'swinging chair' from Singapore when we moved. It was a big bamboo kind of cocoon that hung from the ceiling by a chain. When I was a kid, I would sit in it after school and rock myself whilst reading. I knew stories could take me places, making me feel my world was very large. When, in fact, it was quite small.

Growing up, when did you feel most "other" or "outsider"? When did you feel you most belonged?

I always physically felt like an outsider. I didn't look like anyone else. But I think, and I think many writers probably feel this, I felt more like an outsider in terms of my empathy and the way I liked to observe everything. I was slow and thoughtful in a way that people perhaps mistook for being very daydreamy.

I feel like I belong when I walk on the prairie. Nature is very fair to all. There's no judgment.

How has the hometown reception been to your book of stories? Is there any felt difference in reception inside or outside of Wyoming?

Wyoming has been wonderful in accepting and embracing the book. My hometown bookstore has sold almost 300 books -- which is astounding to me! Who knew? But many people I grew up with or I have known all my life have come and asked me -- "Was that what it was like growing up?" Or have said, "But I haven't ever seen you as brown, I see you as Nina." That is problematic to me in some ways, but I am happy to have conversations about race now that the book is out.

Outside of Wyoming, people have been just as lovely. But who doesn't love Wyoming? In terms of states, it's an enigma. It's more "exotic" than being Indian.

As a child, did you yearn to live somewhere else, or to be someone else?

Fairyland. And I still want to, once in my life, live near the sea or water. Growing up landlocked makes one quite fascinated by water.

What urgent advice would you give an emerging short story writer?

Write a novel first. No, actually, a story collection gives you so many lenses to look at one thing, one place, one theme. It's a gift. I love that I get to talk about Wyoming though the ten stories in my book. I can cover so much ground.

What's next for you?

I am working on a novel. I am getting to the end of the first draft -- and after that, I'd like to write some more nonfiction. But the novel has been such a big part of my life this past two years -- I am not sure what I will do when it's out of my hands. But the nonfiction bug is calling. I worked as a journalist at The Casper Star-Tribune, which is Wyoming's largest statewide newspaper for many years. I loved reporting, meeting people, and telling their stories in a truthful way. I'd like to get back into that some.

Who else should we be reading right now?

Submergence by JM Ledgard is extraordinary -- the best book I've read in ages. Tarfia Faizullah just published a book of poems called Seam that is stunning. I'm very excited to read Teju Cole's new novel (new to being published in the US anyway). And then in the next months, I am looking forward to Elizabeth McCracken's new collection, and novels by Julia Fierro, Ted Thompson, Porchista Khakpour, Cristina Henriquez, and Celeste Ng. And Akhil Sharma is one of my favorite Indian writers. He has a new novel out in the Spring.

If we find ourselves in Wyoming, where must we go no matter what?

I am not going to lie, the major sites like Yellowstone, Devil's Tower, and the Tetons are remarkable. But, I think looking for fossils in Kemmerer is magical, and if you want to experience some thing really nutty -- Thermopolis, Wyoming is for you. It has the world's largest mineral Hot Springs. You must soak, and then go have a drink in the Safari Room at the Days Inn. Hot water + taxidermy = mind blown.]]>Love, Forgiveness, and Pens With Blue Wings: A Curriculumtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2014:/theblog//3.48058652014-02-17T22:18:01-05:002014-04-19T05:59:02-04:00Stacy Parker Le Mellehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-parker-aab/What would happen.../If love took over my country?/ Would we become a happy and united people/Where the world hears only happy news about us/All the time, on all the channels?/ -from "What If Love Took Over My Country" by Yalda

Yalda is an Afghan woman, and she wrote this poem about her home country, Afghanistan. But any of us in America can look out of our home windows, or turn on our television news and ask plaintively, what if love took over our country? Not just the romantic love and desire that is omnipresent in advertising and popular culture, but profound love of fellow human beings, the kind of love that makes another person respected, makes us feel mutually responsible. As we struggle with violence and fear of the "other" and staunch economic inequalities it's clear that we have much to learn from anyone who wishes to enlighten on the themes of love and forgiveness.

Afghan women have much to share. Over the last year, the Afghan Women's Writing Project (AWWP) has worked on a "love and forgiveness" project, underwritten by the Fetzer Institute. In 2013, educators Suzanne Scarfone and Rachel de Baere led a special "love and forgiveness" online workshop. They did their own questioning and writing on these themes, and then asked the women to really think about what such massive concepts meant in their everyday lives, as well as in their dreams. AWWP asked the writers in the general workshops to engage these topics, too. We felt we had as much to learn and gain from the process as any of the writers, and repeatedly we were humbled by the resultant work.

As a staff participant in this project, I find myself still deeply affected by the work. I am struck by our writers who are still writing about love and forgiveness a year later. In N's poem "Bring Me Light" she writes of her difficult life as an Afghan woman, one she compares to being a prisoner:

Visit me, my friends,/
in my permanent prison./
Can you believe that I am a criminal?/
My crime: Telling the truth./
My heart is a library of stories./
Borrow a story. Empty my shelves./
Read every one of me. Judge me/
by my poems. Ask me your questions./
Talk to me./
I am an Afghan woman,/
a soldier with no weapon,/
a woman, with closed lips,/
hidden under night/
behind dark curtains.

I find myself stunned by the power of her words. And I am also deeply moved by how, despite all, she describes herself, her soul:

My pen has blue wings./
My soul is a city of love/
and forgiveness. I am a garden/
of words. The sparrows are my poems.

I am proud that we get to share the women's writings and wisdom through the AWWP website and curriculum. More than ever, I am in awe of the power of love and forgiveness, and in awe of those brave enough to forego the desire to be "hard" or "invincible" and try to love and forgive one another--especially in the public sphere. I have noticed how uncommon it is for our political leaders to use this language, or to be models of this blessed action themselves, especially those obsessed with projecting power. I suppose by definition a political leader must first be concerned with power. I am drawn to re-read Nelson Mandela's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s famous speeches and writings, for no one personified and lived these forces more than they and both wielded considerable political power whether elected or not. But I am eager to hear this wisdom from present day leaders. Leaders who know that it is the strong of spirit who forgive, and the strong of heart who love.

And I am drawn back to the writings of the Afghan women and their example for us everyday people, here and around the world. They are not famous. They risk so much to write in a home culture that praises the invisible, silent woman. Yet, there is so much power in their pens. Nasima sums it up so well in her poem "Hurry":

Hurry
By Nasima

We have such a short time to do this good work,
to forgive each other's small mistakes,
to pay attention to positive points.
We must practice being good people, and
destroy the lens of pessimism in our eyes,
and see the facts of life.
Why are we born to this world,
and what are our plans for this life?
Are they the destruction or betterment of our world?
I try to smile. I don't have money, power
or authority, but I have God who gave me
a mouth with lips for smiling. I have language for speaking.
I can use them for good,
to carry messages of peace and love and forgiveness.
I can smile to grow the root of the friendship tree.
We have such short time to do good work.
Let's hurry.

What a brilliant day--not only is this the UN International Day of the Girl Child, but this is the day, October 11, 2013, when Malala Yousafzai was a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize. She did not win, but she has captured the hearts and minds of millions around the world who admire her for her bravery and for her beautiful mind.

These writers are freedom fighters--only they use the pen not the sword to fight for their rights, for the support and protection that will allow them to contribute fully to their families. They believe in the wild idea that they should be respected and nurtured for individual souls that they are, that they should not have to make themselves small so others will feel big.

In honor of this great day, AWWP writers composed pieces that speak to the realities and dreams of contemporary Afghan girls.

In "I am a Girl", Seeta shows us so vividly what Afghan girls are up against:

"My mother wants/
to send me to school./
My father wants/
to sell me for dollars./
I am a girl, a support for my mother,/
a girl--shame for my father./
She kisses me--he beats me/
for small mistakes./
She encourages me to work on my studies./
He stops me going to school./
I am a girl, who does not know/
which identity is the one for me."

And with lyricism and beauty, Nasima shows us inside the hurting hearts of so many Afghan girls in "A Girl In My Family":

"My heart is full./
And though I have more words to say,/
I am afraid to talk. They placed/
me in unaccustomed darkness,/
and though I have feet to walk,/
there is nowhere to go./
There is no land to stand on as I move./
I have eyes to see,/
but there is no light;/
I have a mouth to speak,/
but a seal of silence/
is stamped on my lips./
I have been sentenced/
in family court for the crime/
of being a girl--"

In "Proud to be an Afghan Girl" Aysha writes of the world she dreams of, one that she and so many Afghan girls are working hard to bring to fruition:

"One day not just our mothers will support us but our country will support us and be proud of us. We are sure that the fight for our rights for a better tomorrow is not wrong. We have this right from Islam that a Muslim girl has the right to live the way she wants.

Yes, we face many problems but we won't stop. Not today and not tomorrow because our country needs us. If out there are terrorists with guns in their hands to kill, then we have pens in our hands to teach.

Every Afghan girl I know believes that we will help rebuild our country."

And in N's ode to the unborn daughter of her dreams, she shares with us just how she would treasure this girl, if given the chance:

"The only dream--the only one/
I have in my life is to have/
a daughter--to love her,/
to love her like myself--a daughter/
I, her mother, will listen to./
The day she is born, I will hold/
a big ceremony, welcome/
my angel, as she steps into my life--/
my little fairy./
I will name her Rose,/
call her Rain.

"I am one of those women with a wild imagination,/
who yearns to see equality of Afghan men and women/
in action and law. I want lovers to walk/
in the streets of Kabul, Herat, Mazar,/
holding hands, sharing hugs, in all cities/
Free of harassment and harsh looks aimed at them like bullets./
I want women to drive cars, taxies, and buses--/
I long to see Afghan women working with confidence, with strength./
I am one of those women with a wild imagination./
I want to see women running in the park,/
unburdened by worries that someone may judge them,/
women running for health, for leadership,/
for president, women swimming, enjoying and changing society."

On this great day, let's treasure and listen to the girls of the world brave enough to what we all should already know--that they are equal, and they have so much to give this world. Brava, dear writers and freedom fighters, brava!

Join AWWP on Oct 17 in Washington, DC for an evening rich in Afghan culture. There will be poetry, dance, a short documentary, and so much more. For ticket information, please visit here.]]>Dealing on Her Name, Dealing on Her Life: Afghan Women in Their Own Wordstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.40375012013-10-03T11:33:46-04:002013-12-03T05:12:01-05:00Stacy Parker Le Mellehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-parker-aab/
We've heard that Afghanistan is the most dangerous country to be female. Yet time and again I am stunned by the power and of the writing of Afghan women and girls who are brave enough to speak the truth about their lives. The Afghan Women's Writing Project works with women and girls who are willing to risk rebuke in their own homes, or in their communities, by telling us and the world about the crimes they suffer on a daily basis, and then, for telling us about their beautiful dreams.

In her stunning essay "Am I a Human or a Goat?" Freshta writes about how dehumanizing it is for women and girls to be reduced to salable creatures, how they are treated no better than goats:

"A girl child is raised, given water, food and shelter, much as a goat is raised until it has put on a sufficient amount of meat. A girl is raised until she reaches puberty. Then, as the goat is sold, so is the girl....Sheer baha basically means that the boy's family has to pay for the amount of milk that a girl has drunk as a child. Alas, I live in a country where I don't even have rights to my mother's milk: even that is a liability that my would-be groom's family has to pay back."

In her heartfelt and affecting poem "The Dark Net" Mina has the courage to call out the Afghan officials who make promises to help women, and take money to do so, but then do nothing of the sort:

Men deal on my name/
They make money by supporting women/
But this support is just words/
They build comfortable buildings/
Maybe commercial buildings/
Maybe huge castles/
With pride they hang pictures of me on the walls of their halls/
Me and my burqa

And then, there is Anonymous. Anonymous speaks directly to one audience in this poem. Anonymous asks the purest questions one can ask:

In the hot summer afternoons/
When my husband sleeps in the shadow of the trees/
I am still hungry/
I am not done with my housework/
I have a baby on my shoulder/
I am eight months pregnant/
My four-year-old is dead from fever/
My husband is under the tree/
Daydreaming of the money he will make/
Selling my little 13-year-old Marwa,/
Mariam for more, because she can knit carpets/

God! If you were me/
How would you feel?/
How could you help a helpless mother?/
God! It is you who gave them power/
It is you who call them Sir!

But then, on September 10, 2013, came a small miracle in Afghanistan. Their national soccer team won the South Asian Games in India. And for one glorious night, there was palpable peace, pleasure, and unity throughout the country. Several AWWP writers wrote about the spontaneous celebrations--the first time many of them enjoyed a night like this. Arifa, one of the AWWP teen writers, described the night and the hopes the win inspired:

"People were inviting each other to pray together. When the team scored and we won the game, people were inviting each other to celebrate. They came together without discrimination. I saw people hand-in-hand like brothers. I saw friendships, love, and happiness among my people that I have not seen before.

It made people think the country can improve and that we can stand on our own feet even after 2014 when the American soldiers leave. Now people want to do something better for a better future: build more buildings, make more products.

I believe that we will have more of this kind of success in the near future and we will have better September 11ths from now on, with hope for ending darkness and starting a new morning.

Tonight I will close
The story of war and darkness
I will open a story of
Love and forgiveness."

There is so much uncertainty ahead for the Afghan people. But if we can continue to listen to the Afghan women, and find ways to offer helping hands, we know that there is great hope. To learn and read more, please visit here.

Join AWWP on Oct 17 in Washington, DC for an evening rich in Afghan culture. There will be poetry, dance, a short documentary, and so much more. For ticket information, please visit here.]]>Getting Detroit Right: An Interview with Filmmaker Pam Sporntag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.40144682013-09-29T21:35:25-04:002013-11-29T05:12:01-05:00Stacy Parker Le Mellehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-parker-aab/"Detroit is not just abandoned buildings, people live here." -Jack Watkins, age 25.

To be a Detroit native is to have felt that catch in the throat, that sheer trepidation when encountering a news story or a film or a play about our hometown--that fear of what is going to be said, that wonder if the writer is going to get it right. I was born in the city, but when I was six, we moved north to the suburbs. I remember growing up and feeling very protective of the city when a suburban peer made a joke or an ignorant observation. Now that I live in New York, though returning often to visit family, I feel doubly protective, knowing how easy it is for outsiders to write off much that is vital about back home, and misunderstand much that fails.

I recently spoke with filmmaker and former Detroiter Pam Sporn about telling Detroit stories. She is currently working on a documentary called Detroit 48202 in which she follows her old Cass Tech classmate Wendell Watkins on his route around the New Center area. Watkins has worked this route for over 25 years, and can tell so much about the changes on his streets, and the changes in the city, by virtue of the years spent going door-to-door and and delivering mail. He's spent a lifetime growing bonds--between his feet and the earth, between himself and the neighbors, and Sporn is capturing this rich community life in her film. Sporn also lives in New York, and I talk to her about the insider/outsider dynamic and how that affects her work as a storyteller. We also talk about Detroit cliches and who is getting Detroit right these days.

Outsiders v Insiders: Does it take a native Detroiter to get the stories right? Or do outside observers have the advantage? How important are one's origins when it comes to storytelling?

What makes a Detroit story "right" depends on your point of view. For me, a Detroit story that "gets it right" is one that foregrounds the experience of everyday Detroiters and one that has a social justice framework. I emphasize social justice because I think working-class Detroiters have been dealt a great injustice by having wealth, jobs, and public services being sucked out of their city.

I don't think an "outsider" can pop in and tell a story like that, but just by virtue of living in Detroit doesn't mean a person will tell a story that asks the critical questions needed to create social change. It's probably easier for an outsider to create a story that exploits Detroit's situation but an "insider" could also be so invested in a kind of boosterism that might prevent them from including anything that might make Detroit "look bad."

Personally, I'm at the point where I don't want to see another image of Michigan Central Station. I consider it Ruins Porn 101. Yet, it still is an incredible monument to abandonment, and it symbolizes much more, depending on your POV. Are there Detroit images, or stories, that have become cliché to you? Even if they are cliché, do you have a hard time giving them up?

The thing that bothers me about the repeated use of the image of Michigan Central Station is that when media makers use it they don't stop to ask if someone owns the building. It is used as a cliché that could mean anything, like you say. I think most people would think no one owns that building so there is a sense of powerlessness that nothing can be done--with the building--or Detroit.

But the fact is that since 1995 a billionaire named Manuel Moroun, who also owns the Ambassador Bridge, has owned Michigan Central Station. It is a huge structure, but someone with billions of dollars at his disposal could do something with that building, but he has made a decision not to. Asking the question, "why not?" could make the use of that image really meaningful.

Another Detroit image that I think is a cliché is the image of the empty Packard Auto Plant. It's a powerful image because it is so immense and of course, it is meaningful in the history of the auto industry. But, if the image is used to convey the idea that the auto industry declined after the uprising of 1967 and due to competition from Japanese cars it becomes a meaningless cliché. The Packard Plant actually closed in 1956, after the company merged with Studebaker. It had done so to attempt to survive competition from the Big Three-Ford, Chrysler, and GM, which wiped out the independent auto companies. So, the image of the plant really represents capitalist competition and the consolidation of the auto industry.

Who documents Detroit best? Who are the filmmakers, journalists, artists, or musicians that you think are really getting Detroit right these days?

There are 2 organizations I particularly admire doing media and arts work in Detroit. One is the Allied Media Projects, which is a main partner in the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition. Through their Detroit Futures programs and Discotech events, they are giving Detroiters the tools needed to tell their own stories.

The other is the Inside Out Literary Arts Program founded by Dr. Terry Blackhawk, a veteran English teacher and activist in the Detroit Public Schools. Inside Out offers hundreds of Detroit students the opportunity to express themselves through poetry and publishes their work. I think they are "getting Detroit right" because they are facilitating Detroiters telling their own stories.

Tell us about your current project Detroit 48202.

I attended the Allied Media Conference in Detroit in the summer of 2009. I hadn't been in Detroit for 10 years because my parents had moved to Chicago when they retired. I had seen some of the physical decline of the city while they still lived there, especially along Woodward Avenue in Highland Park where we had lived. I had visited the Heidelberg Project in the early 1990s so I knew there were areas that had vacant lots. But I wasn't prepared for the vastness of the decline when I visited in 2009.

A friend drove me around to see the two houses I had grown up in, one on McLean Avenue in Highland Park, and the other on Oak Drive, near Livernois and 6 Mile. I was afraid of what the house on McLean Avenue would look like, because as we started driving through Highland Park I was seeing trees growing out of houses. It was unimaginable to me. To my surprise the house was in beautiful shape, better than when we lived there in the 1960s!

On to the northwest side, the University District still looked beautiful-the Tudor style houses with big lawns and lots of trees. However, also to my surprise, the house we lived in on Oak Drive was boarded up! The roof was drooping over the windows of the room that had been my parents' bedroom and the screen door was swinging eerily against the front door. I had an empty feeling, partly from seeing the house abandoned, and partly because it seemed to emphasize the fact that both of my parents were gone, not just from Detroit, but deceased.

I suppose that visit could have closed the door for good on Detroit for me--I had no relatives there, but it made me think about Detroit in a way I hadn't for years. It was just off my radar. But I was really struck and thought, what in the world happened here?

I recently saw the trailer for Grace Lee's new documentary about Grace Lee Boggs, "American Revolutionary." In an opening scene Grace Lee Boggs says, "I feel sorry for people who don't live in Detroit." I can identify with a modification of that statement: "I feel lucky to have grown up in Detroit." Although I come from a very left wing family, I don't think I would have the same understanding of racial dynamics, racism, and labor history if I had grown up somewhere else.

When I was in Detroit in 2009, one of the people I got to spend some time with, after not seeing him for a long time, was my friend Wendell Watkins. Wendell and I went to Cass Technical High School together in the 1970s and were both members of a student activist group called Challenge Corps. We were trying to organize other students to protest against racism and the War in Vietnam.

Shortly after that visit to Detroit I ran into as mutual friend in NYC who said, "Can you believe Wendell has been on his postal route for 25 years?" Something clicked in my head that told me, there's a story! I thought by following Wendell on his route for a week with my camera, and listening in on his conversations with customers I would have a great character study (Wendell is what I'd call an organic intellectual/philosopher with a dry, sometimes silly, sense of humor), and that I'd find out what had caused the devastating decline of the city and how Detroit's resilient people were surviving.

I learned so much from Wendell in that week about how the buildings and houses on his route had changed over the years and I also learned about some Detroit history I hadn't known about. Gloria Owens is a feisty octogenarian who until June 2013 was the manager of one of the buildings on Wendell's route. She is everyone's "mama," according to Kim Moore another resident of that building who has become a part of the story. Ms. Owens' family was one of the first to move in (escorted by state troopers) to the contested Sojourner Truth Houses in 1942. So, conversations between Ms. Owens and Wendell shed light on the history of systematic racial segregation of housing in Detroit that was facilitated by Federal policy and has implications for today.

But, of course, it's hard to tell a meaningful story that captures the complexities of a place by popping in and shooting for one week. So, what I thought would be a quick project has turned into my returning 5 more times over 2 years to shoot in Detroit and do archival research. That gets to your insider/outsider question. An insider has an intimate relationship with a place and people in that place and is therefore in tune with what's happening now. By regularly returning to Detroit I've been able to build more of a relationship with some of the people on Wendell's route, and reach beyond the route to explore larger political and historical questions that I felt I wasn't getting the answers by remaining in that limited area.

And, I had to return because things keep developing in Detroit. In the time I've been working on Detroit 48202, Michigan voters overturned Michigan Public Act 4, (which gave the governor the right to impose an emergency manager on a city or school system that was in financial crisis), the state legislature simply rewrote the law and the governor appointed an Emergency Manager in Detroit anyway, and now the EM has entered Detroit in bankruptcy proceedings. These are very bad developments for people in Detroit because it means an attack on their voting rights and on their collective bargaining rights and many retirees' pensions. It's a challenge but I think the histories and conversations we hear along the postal route need the present context as a backdrop.

Good developments have also occurred that I've been able to track and document. In April 2012 I filmed a conversation between Wendell and a dynamic individual who lives in the 48202 zip code-Julia Putnam. Julia was telling Wendell about her efforts, along with a team inspired by the Boggs Center, to open a new community based school on the East Side of Detroit. Well, that school opened its doors to over 50 children this month (Sept. 2013)! So, Julia is one of the heroines of Detroit 48202.

How does the story of a postal route illuminate the city as a whole?

Documenting personal exchanges and relationships on a postal route represents the quote by Wendell's nephew-"Detroit is not just abandoned buildings, people live here." The postal route shows people living in a community, something that sometimes get left out of representations of Detroit as a kind of post apocalyptic place. A postal route is a line on a map. So, as we move along with Wendell on his route, we're mapping a section of the city. That map reveals a kind of microcosm of Detroit because of its diversity.

For example, in the New Center Area we see some solid blocks of stately brick homes in really good condition, and we see a block with one abandoned home remaining standing. We see apartment buildings that are fully occupied and ones that are 1/3 occupied and ones that are empty and abandoned. We see an abandoned hospital and an empty school, evidence of a loss of population. But we also see apartment buildings that are in the process of being renovated that will offer a mixture of affordable and market rate apartments. We don't see much car traffic, except for on Woodward Ave and we don't see busses going down Second Ave. because that bus route was eliminated. But we do see the headquarters of the Detroit NAACP and a day care center.

The physical nature of the route and the commentary of Wendell and residents and a developer give a sense of a flux--hearing about what used to be, how residential occupancy decreased when General Motors moved its HQ from New Center to downtown, hearing a mixture of optimism and skepticism about the renovations being done by the development firm. Following the postal route is a physical and mental journey that can open up questions about where the city is heading, and who and what within the city will be the social and economic priorities.

You now live in the Bronx. What does life in NYC teach you about life back home in Detroit?

I started teaching high school in the South Bronx in the Fall of 1980, at the tail end of the fires that decimated the Bronx and caused hundreds of thousands people to move away from the borough. I would walk to my job past vast lots and hulks of buildings. A lot of the Bronx has been rebuilt, through a variety of efforts, but it looked very different back then. Learning about the disinvestment and insurance fraud by landlords that in great part decimated the Bronx is what first introduced me to the idea of "redlining," that intentional writing off of certain neighborhoods and people, by lending institutions. I saw the devastating impact on the Bronx of that disinvestment, made worse by city cutbacks during a time of fiscal crisis.

When I look at Detroit I see the results of the same kind of disinvestment, except I think its worse for Detroit because I feel like the economic powers abandoned the whole city (the center city, not the suburbs).

The school I was teaching in--Schomburg Satellite Academy--was a progressive, alternative school that relied on the creativity and talents of its staff and students to create a community. We defied the stereotypes of the Bronx and its teenagers. So, that's why I identify so much with what the folks building the Boggs School in Detroit are doing.

On the flip side, some of the same areas of NYC that were so devastated in the 1980s and 1990s and considered "undesirable" have now become high-income areas, inaccessible to poor or working class people. I recently read an article in the NY Times about how Brownsville (Brooklyn) is the area of the city where the highest number of people entering the shelter system are coming from. Why? Because housing in Bed-Stuy is becoming so expensive that poorer Bed-Stuy residents are moving to Brownsville.

What is happening in NYC informs what is happening in Detroit and vice versa, to a degree. The bottom line in both places is question for all cities. As changes happen in industry and technology, and urban planners, and real estate developers, and businesses make their decisions, who are they imagining cities are for? For my film, I interviewed June Manning Thomas a professor of Urban Planning at U of Mich, who has written about urban development and race in Detroit. She calls for an approach to urban planning that is based on social justice. I don't think that is where businesses or developers in Detroit or NYC have their priorities, but I think that is the fight that communities in cities across the US have.

Does leaving and returning to Detroit help you or hurt you as a teller of Detroit stories?

Not living in Detroit for many years probably hurts my ability to tell a Detroit story because I've been disconnected for so long. However, part of the film I'm making is my Detroit story, so it's also my story.

One way I think returning to Detroit helps as a storyteller is that things that people living in Detroit have maybe gotten used to seeing (like empty school buildings offered for lease or sale by the Detroit Public Schools) still disarm me. And I think viewers around the country should be disarmed by the abandonment of a black working class city by business and government.

Pam Sporn will be presenting at the North American Labor History Conference at Wayne State University on Oct. 24th. For more information, go here.]]>Disappearing Acts: Talking Storytelling, Spanish Harlem, and Prep School Suspensions with Author Greg Takoudestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.39317822013-09-15T18:32:31-04:002013-11-15T05:12:01-05:00Stacy Parker Le Mellehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-parker-aab/
So you don't have to be an East Harlem teen to relate to Francisco, the protagonist of Greg Takoudes's compelling debut novel When We Wuz Famous (Henry Holt). A star scholar-athlete at his NYC public school, Francisco wins a full scholarship to a prestigious upstate prep school for his senior year. He loves his home and his friends, but he wants a life beyond the projects. And now he's a hero, the boy done good, the one that will bring glory to his Puerto Rican family and community. The fancy school is the promise of all they don't have, of all they've ever dreamt for him.

Francisco may have a new, albeit isolated life, but there's problems back home with his circle of friends. In well-drawn scenes brimming with life and poignancy, Takoudes shows us that departure itself doesn't sever the cords of love, and how those loved ones tethered to you by the heart still hold sway, even when that sway is for the worse not the better.

I really enjoyed When We Wuz Famous. Takoudes told this story first as a film (Up With Me), working with non-professional actors in East Harlem locations. Each scene in the novel is screenplay tight, and moves the story forward with impressive momentum. Each character is well-drawn and pops off the page. There's no waste here, just whip-smart storytelling. And best of all, for every action, there are real world consequences. This may be a young adult (YA) novel, but the realism and authenticity feels strong. A recommended read.

After finishing, I asked Takoudes to answer a few questions about When We Wuz Famous and the life experience that informs it so powerfully.

You were once a boarding school kid on scholarship. How did that experience inform your desire to create the film Up With Me and the novel When We Wuz Famous?

Yup, I went to boarding school in Massachusetts. I was a white scholarship student, and while being a scholarship kid isn't a ready-made situation for feeling "in the club," I think I felt lucky to be there at all. What shaped my experiences more was seeing some of my friends get kicked out. They'd disappear off campus so fast that you rarely even had a chance to say goodbye. I became interested in what happened to these kids who kind of dropped off the map; I wondered where they went next. What the rest of their lives held.

Well, as it turns out, I got suspended for my senior year, and so I became that kid. The one who fell off the map. And the answer to my question was, nothing happens to you. You go home and your life just stops. It was a surreal, unsettling, boring time in my life. I was 17 and lost and living with my parents again. I laid around in bed a lot. I played golf on a local par-3 course, wondering if my life was over. I coached gymnastics. I embarked on one of those baseball park road trips. It was a year of random experiences, but it spurred some creative juices in me which would take years to realize as the film, and then the book.

How did you end up finishing high school?

One year after my suspension, I went back to school and was allowed to try my senior year a second time. A do-over, essentially. I came back to school feeling sort of tamed and calm. I don't know how else to explain it. Returning had put me in a rather unusual position on campus, but by that point, I had grown fairly comfortable being on the road less traveled. And then I discovered something new: the road less traveled was actually packed with people. See, by that time, I'd decided to go to a Big Ten state school where I eventually found tons of people like me, people who didn't know exactly where they were headed in life but all wanted to be in this sprawling, interesting place together. It was what I needed at the time. It helped me continue moving forward to the next stage of my life, working in Hollywood, and then to New York.

You worked with local Harlem kids to make the film Up with Me. Tell us about the rewards and challenges of casting local, amateur talent for your movie, and tell us about local response to the film itself.

Working with nonprofessional actors was one of the great joys of making Up With Me. Before I started making the film, I knew how I wanted to work, more than I knew what the film was going to be. I knew I wanted the film to be raw and true to a specific place, and when you think about those qualities, casting non-professionals can be an interesting way to go.

When I started auditioning kids in East Harlem, I was astonished by the talent I found. People say that everyone has some type of genius inside of them, and I agree. I also think that adulthood can kill that genius if you're not careful. Or at least bury it deep. So working with local kids was great. They felt comfortable in the shooting locations (the locations were their apartments and blocks, after all), and my actors lacked all preciousness about their craft. One moment, they'd be chilling with their friends, and the next moment I'd pull them into the scene and they just start giving this performance that was absolutely heartbreaking. What a thrill it was to see that.

The local reception to Up With Me occurred a year later, after we'd won a Special Jury Award at South-by-Southwest (an acting award, actually), when we held our New York premiere with Rooftop Films on the roof of El Museo del Barrio, in East Harlem. Over five hundred people came to see the film, and for me it was a coming home. The process coming full circle. I could show the folks in whose streets we shot: here's what we did. Here's what we were working on for all those long months.

After you finished your film, you decided to create a YA novel out of the same story. What was it like to put what was on screen between the covers of a book?

I started writing the book based on the original script (which was really just a series of notes for scenes I had written down). But rather quickly, the book took off and became its own thing. You write a movie script based on the budget you have, and the budget for my film was small - like, piggy-bank small. For the book, I created scenes that I could never afford to shoot, so I was able to unleash my imagination, which was a thrill. Of course, the experience cuts both ways because the hardest chapters in the book to write ended up being the ones that were inspired by the most quiet, simple scenes in the movie. Writing simply is, simply put, awfully hard.

There's one scene in particular where this came up. It's the scene where Francisco returns home for the first time from boarding school. In the movie, the scene is set in a tiny park in East Harlem - this little bucolic patch of fake streams and flowers. On our set (if you can even call it that), it was just the two actors, myself, and cinematographer Matt Timms. The mood was very intimate, very chill; we took our time but didn't languish; and the actors took off with these wonderfully natural, moving performances. It's a simple, poetic scene, and one of my favorites in the film. It was a dream scenario for a director because everyone just knew what to do with almost no direction. But when it came to writing the scene in the book, it became very challenging for me to recreate that magic. I ended up having to go a different direction for that scene in the book, and make it a scene that's somewhat more confrontational and dramatic. For the movie, the poetry was enough; for the book, it needed to serve as a launching pad for growing tensions between the friends.

What's better: screenwriting or novel-writing?

Depends what I'm in the mood for. Screenwriting is a top-down process; you begin with a premise, and then develop everything from there. Character, themes, conflicts, grow out of the central premise. This is true even for a largely improvised movie like mine. Screenwriting is closely structured for reasons that I sort of understand, and yet still mystify me. I suspect part of the reason is there's so little room in a script to get your story across. Let's say your script is 100 pages, that's not a lot of room. Screenwriting naturally compresses the story and relies on the actors' performances to open up all that great depth of the characters.

Books, of course, can just go on and on - so long as you're not boring the reader. There's no budget running through your head while you're writing a book, no invisible producer telling you that such-and-such a scene is going to be too expensive to shoot, or that we'll need to hire a pigeon-wrangler just to get a pigeon to fly off at just the right moment in a scene - and avoiding that hassle is really nice.

Tell us about your love for Spanish Harlem.

The love I have for Spanish Harlem came fast. I had been looking for a location in New York to shoot and I didn't have anything specific in mind other than this: I wanted to be inspired. I wanted the location to feel like it kept coming alive for me. As soon as I got off the 6 train and started walking up into the neighborhood, Spanish Harlem gave me what I needed - grit and beauty, charm and surprises. And, of course, amazing people, including six extremely talented cast members who either lived or worked there. I kept looking over my shoulder while I was shooting, wondering why I wasn't seeing more filmmakers making their films up in Spanish Harlem.

I've never really understood what people mean when they say that a location is a character in a film, but I do know that Spanish Harlem has a lot of character. I never once found myself struggling to come up with a place to shoot the next scene; turn the corner, and something new would pop out.

What's the next project?

A few things. I'm working on another YA novel that takes place in the New York culinary world, and I'm also looking to shoot a new movie in Alaska. I also recently directed a movie in Florida, which we're still editing. A friend of mine once observed that I seemed to be setting my movies and books at the corners of the country, so maybe after the Alaska movie, my next one will take place in Hawaii. Wouldn't that be nice?

Greg Takoudes will be reading at Shrine in Harlem on Tuesday, September 25, from 7-9pm. For more information, go here.]]>Quadroons for Beginners: Discussing the Suppressed and Sexualized History of Free Women of Color with Author Emily Clarktag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.38696052013-09-04T18:48:44-04:002013-11-04T05:12:01-05:00Stacy Parker Le Mellehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-parker-aab/"As a historian, I knew that mixed race women and interracial families were everywhere in America from its earliest days. And I knew that most of the free women of color in antebellum New Orleans bore no resemblance to the quadroons of myth." - Dr. Emily Clark

As an American, I follow my roots like trails across the globe. My mother is from Kansas and is of German descent, and my deceased father was black with roots in North Carolina, and before then, Africa. Arguably you can trace all of us back to Africa. But my parents' union created me: a black American woman, a woman of color, a mixed kid, a mulatta, maybe an Oreo, definitely a myriad of identities and categories to embrace or resist.

Living in Harlem, I see so many mixed marriages, mixed kids everyday all the time. Traveling the South, I see so many kids with the telltale curly locks. Growing up in Metro Detroit in the 80s, I knew there were other black & white mixes like me. I just didn't know them. Only at college in Washington, DC, did I meet mixed girls and have them as friends. And not until my English, women's studies, and African-American history courses did I learn any American history about women like me.

Before college, maybe I'd encounter a definition of "miscegenation" - that very special crime of racemixing in segregated America. And maybe an explanation of the "one drop rule" that went on to create the classifications of "mulatto" and "quadroon" and "octaroon"--your label dependent upon which fraction of African was in your genealogy. But that was it. In my high school American History texts, I don't remember any acknowledgement of centuries of rape and consensual relationships between whites and blacks. None of my suburban history teachers lingered on the taboo. Maybe I didn't either. When I think of the mania around racemixing, and of the cultural trope of the "tragic mulatta"--the woman doomed because she is too white for the blacks, too black for the whites--it was easy to assume that the history of mixed-race women in America was simple in its sadness and injustice.

Yet there is nothing simple about the American Quadroon. Once she was the picture of irresistible beauty, the symbol of a city thought of as irredeemably "other", an earthbound goddess who conjured so much desire that white men made her concubines, and slavetraders scoured the states for enslaved girls that fit her description to fulfill buyer demand. That was the myth, the dominant story. But as Tulane historian Emily Clark writes in her richly-researched and compelling The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World (UNC Press), she was also a family-woman, marrying men of color, living the propriety dream in her New Orleans society. If her myth was simple in its power, her reality was rich and complicated--by no means a single story.

The minute I saw The Strange History of the American Quadroon had been published, I knew I had to read it. I've long been fascinated with Louisiana's free women of color, and I've always been curious about truth versus fiction when it comes to New Orleans's famed "Quadroon Balls" and the young, cultured women of color who became lifelong partners to white male suitors. Dr. Clark's work does not disappoint. Her scholarship clears away the smoke and pulls back the veils on much received wisdom, revealing just how empowered, and how impressive our women of color ancestors could be. I especially appreciate how she challenges the very notion that plaçage --a contracted concubinage--was an accurate description for the relationships between white men and their women of color partners, arguing instead that it may be misguided shorthand, a diminishment of lives and loves just as robust and red-blooded as any others. As Dr. Clark states below, she has never once found a signed plaçage contract--and she has looked.

Yes, The Strange History of the American Quadroon was a pageturner for me, for how could I not be hungry to keep reading when I felt that so much history was being revealed? Upon finishing, I asked Dr. Clark to share more about these hidden women, these heroines often unaccounted for when we think about the great American survivors or race in our country. I grew up in Michigan reading next to nothing about them in mainstream history texts. If you read Dr. Clark's work, you will be moved by the ways our ancestors coped with much that was raw and horrific in our nation's past, and how many did so with refinement and uncommon grace. For those who know little about free women of color, consider the following Quadroons for beginners. I thought I was past the "beginner" stage, but reading Dr. Clark made me realize I still had much to learn.

How do you define an "American Quadroon"?

Dr. Clark: There are really two versions. One is the virtually unknown historical reality, the married free women of color of New Orleans who were paragons of piety and respectability. The other is the more familiar mythic figure who took shape in the antebellum American imagination. If you asked a white nineteenth-century American what a quadroon was, they would answer that she was a light-skinned free woman of color who preferred being the mistress of a white man to marriage with a man who shared her racial ancestry. In order to ensnare white lovers who would provide for them, quadroons were supposedly schooled from girlhood by their mothers to be virtuosos in the erotic arts. When they came of age, their mothers put them on display at quadroon balls and negotiated a contract with a white lover to set the young woman up in a house and provide enough money to support her and any children born of the liaison. The arrangement usually ended in heartbreak for the quadroon when the lover left her to marry a white woman. If this sounds like a white male rape fantasy, that is exactly what it was. There is one other key characteristic of the mythic American Quadroon: she was to be found only in New Orleans.

What did it mean to be a free woman of color in antebellum New Orleans?

Dr. Clark: There's no simple answer to that question. If you were born after 1790 to parents who had themselves been born in New Orleans, you were likely to marry a free man of color and have children and see them grow up to marry and have children. In the 1820s you would have been as likely to marry as white women in the city. But the story was different for women who were refugees of the Haitian Revolution and their daughters. Different practices in pre-revolutionary Haiti, known as Saint-Domingue, coupled with the economic and social trauma of dislocation made it less likely that these free women of color would marry.

One thing that both native-born and refugee women shared, however, was the burden of a racist legal system that stigmatized them, discriminated against them, and made it easy to humiliate them.

New Orleans became world famous for its "Quadroon Balls". In your book, you argue that many descriptions of these balls were just repetitions of one 1826 eyewitness account. What was it really like to attend a quadroon ball? How did these balls change over time to accommodate tourists looking for the legend?

Dr. Clark: The earliest reliable account of a quadroon ball that we have comes from a German count who visited New Orleans in the 1820s. He describes an extremely sedate affair where the young women were "well and gracefully dressed, and conducted themselves with much propriety and modesty. Cotillions and waltzes were danced, and several of the ladies performed elegantly." Ten years later a man visiting from Virginia describes women dancing in their night garments, which suggests that the "propriety and modesty" of the 1820s had been replaced by something very different, a spectacle that catered to the sexual fantasies aroused by the earlier accounts. By the 1840s the quadroon balls had moved to a rowdy dancehall near the docks. Male patrons were warned that they were likely to be robbed if they took money in with them and evenings often ended in violent brawls.

Let's talk plaçage. Why would a free woman of color enter into such a relationship?

Dr. Clark: Let me say first that "plaçage" as a notion is as problematic as the mythic quadroon. There was really no such thing -- even the term itself comes from a 20th-century Haitian practice, not from 19th-century New Orleans. There was no system of mothers brokering placements for their daughters with white men they had met at a quadroon ball. Instead, there was a broad range of relationships between free women of color and white men that originated in a variety of ways and often lasted for life. For an enslaved woman in late colonial New Orleans, entering into a sexual relationship with a white man who was not her owner could sometimes be a path to freedom, as it was for one of the women I write about, Agnes Mathieu.

For women already free, a life partnership with a man, white or black, offered better prospects for economic stability than remaining a single mother -- and we have to remember that nearly all women of this era became mothers. Some of the mixed couples that I write about -- Samuel Moore and Dorothée Lassize, for example, were entrepreneurial teams. For the Haitian refugee women who arrived in New Orleans in the massive influx of 1809, a liaison with a white man -- even a temporary one -- could represent an expedient survival strategy. In at least one well documented case, a free woman of color and a white man underwent a sacramental wedding even though the laws of Louisiana prohibited their legal marriage to one another. Most of the men in these relationships, by the way, never abandoned the free black mothers of their children. They went to their graves legal bachelors.

The legal prohibition against interracial marriage in antebellum Louisiana was an attempt to stigmatize free women of color who made families with white men. I feel that we somehow do the same when we lump them all together under the imaginary rubric of plaçage.

You write of the ménagère relationship in Saint-Domingue (Haiti) as precursor to "plaçage." Please tell us about the difference between the two roles for women of color.

Dr. Clark: It's a precursor in the sense that people who observed examples of the ménagère among the Haitian refugees in New Orleans misread it and created from it a prototype for the imaginary system of plaçage. A ménagère was a free woman of color hired to keep house for a planter in pre-revolutionary Saint-Domingue. She was hired formally, with a contract that stipulated what she would be compensated in pay and things like housing and healthcare. Many of these contracts survive in the archives for Saint-Domingue. Sometimes, but not always, a ménagère became the sexual partner of her employer, often for life. When visitors to New Orleans described the way relationships between free women of color and white men worked, they often spoke of a contract that was negotiated. I've never encountered such a contract in the archives of New Orleans -- and I've looked! -- but ménagère contracts are mentioned in several lawsuits brought by Haitian refugee women against the white men who did not honor the contract once the couple came to New Orleans. To a visitor to New Orleans in the 1810s and 1820s, there was no difference between the French-speaking free women of color born in the city and those who were Haitian refugees. A garbled, vaguely understood impression of the immigrant ménagère became the archetype for all of the city's free women of color for the Anglophone observers who wrote the seminal accounts of the New Orleans quadroon.

Tell us about the "fancy trade". How common was it to purchase light-skinned enslaved women for sex and domestic service? How much do we know about how these women fared? How does this practice connect to Storyville, and later day New Orleans's culture of prostitution? (Or does it?)

Dr. Clark: We don't really know how common this practice was. It is a hard thing to pin down in terms of real numbers. There are some court cases that illuminate the seamy workings of the trade in "fancy maids." They reveal that there were several slave traders from the upper south who specialized in bringing light-skinned enslaved women to New Orleans. And that suggests that these men scoured the upper south in search of women who looked like what people expected to find in New Orleans, the home of the quadroon. The picture that comes through from the court cases is grim: teenaged girls, some of them in very poor health, kept in squalid living conditions. Emily Landau has written an excellent book, Spectacular Wickedness, that discusses the link between the quadroon/"fancy maid" fantasy and the popularity of brothels that featured light-skinned women of color in Storyville, the red light district in post-bellum New Orleans.

How is the quadroon myth alive today?

Dr. Clark: Take one of the popular horse-drawn carriage tours of New Orleans and I'll bet you that you'll hear about the quadroons and their balls. A hotel in the city that occupies the site of one of the ballrooms in which dances for free women of color were held promotes itself with advertising copy about quadroon balls. In a way, the city of New Orleans is itself seen by the rest of the country as a quadroon, a city given over to the exotic, transgressive qualities that defined the myth.

What drew you to the history of quadroons? Why did you feel compelled to devote your attention to their stories?

Dr. Clark: The short answer is Hurricane Katrina. New Orleans was misrepresented and maligned by so many in the storm's aftermath, and much of that sprang from people's perception that the city was not really American. The myth of the quadroon was part of that: supposedly she only existed in New Orleans, could only survive in New Orleans because it was the only place that could tolerate such a supposed aberration from American racial and sexual norms. But as a historian, I knew that mixed race women and interracial families were everywhere in America from its earliest days. And I knew that most of the free women of color in antebellum New Orleans bore no resemblance to the quadroons of myth. The women I write about can't set the record straight about themselves and the city they lived in. In the aftermath of the storm, I couldn't not take on that work.

As a high school student in Michigan in the late 80s, I remember learning precious little about mixed race people, and absolutely zilch about free women of color. Do you think it's important for history curricula to include their stories? If so, what should textbook makers stop the presses and include right this minute?

Dr. Clark: Yes, I do think it's important. The system of slavery depended on a pair of binaries: slave or free, black or white. Mixed race people challenged that binary at every turn, and still do. I think that one of the reasons that free women of color are absent from the history taught in schools is in part because their stories have for so long been presumed to be universally tragic and shameful. The presumption has been that sexual exploitation defined their experience, and that's a topic that has a hard time finding space in school curricula.

Every enslaved woman and many free women of color did find themselves vulnerable to rape and sexual aggression from white men. But that is not the whole story. Some free women of color formed life partnerships or married and lived the kinds of settled, respectable, secure lives that were supposed to be attainable only by white women in antebellum America. When school textbooks talk about the 19th-century cult of true womanhood, I'd like for them to note that some of the women who exemplified it best were free women of color living in New Orleans.]]>The Girl Who Spoke to Flowers: The Stories and Dreams of Afghan Girl Writerstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.38567602013-09-02T13:40:51-04:002013-11-02T05:12:02-04:00Stacy Parker Le Mellehttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/stacy-parker-aab/
And I know they hear me.
Most people don't know
That flowers can hear us.
Flowers are always quiet
Because they are listening."
-Madia, age 14

In her poem "Talking With Flowers", Madia writes about fighting and war and how when she needs someone to talk to, she can speak to the flowers for they listen. Luckily, Madia can do this on school grounds, for she is an Afghan girl who is able to pursue her education. But she cannot take this for granted. With school attendance remaining an often dangerous endeavor for female children, and with the women's literacy rate estimated at 12% nationwide, the right to learn must be fought for and protected.

At the Afghan Women's Writing Project, we connect international women authors, journalists, and teachers with Afghan women and girls via online workshops. The Afghan women send in their essays, stories, and poems and their mentors help them develop their writing, their ideas, their voices on the page.

This year, we've begun a special project: an intensive workshop for girls. In the second installment of our Teen Writers' Workshop, we showcase the work of our youngest writers, girls aged 12-15. Once again, we are delighted and moved by their visions and their experiences and the wisdom they already bring the world.

"On my way home from school, I often stop at a bakery to buy bread. I've always been curious about the woman who makes the bread. She looks about thirty-seven and I wonder how she does this job, working from six in the morning to seven or eight at night, baking through the hottest days of the summer, and also cooking for her family.

One day I asked her. She told me that she has worked as a baker for fifteen years and that she is the only person in her home with a job. When she was seventeen, her father gave her to the man who is now her husband. He does not work. The woman said that her husband would force her out of their home if she did not work.

In contrast to this story, I see many things about working women that make me proud to support the cause of women's rights in Afghanistan. I see women in our schools, from teachers up to the principal. These are educated women working to create more educated women."

For as Arifa later writes: "A country in which half of the population is allowed to diminish the other half is like a body where disease in one part destroys the rest."

"But I will rise in the dark sky of Afghanistan
to bring back the shining sun.
I would love to have my own land
to share and to live in it,
to change the darkness to light,
to give courage to my people.
The courage to be together
and to not be alone.

People think that we are alone
but if they feel for each other they would say,
we are together in this land.
Instead of starting to fight and war, they would say 'Welcome'
and if they see the bleeding of people they would stop killing."

In her poem "My Mother Said Be Happy" after she tells us of her mother being widowed at age 22 with four girls to care for, Madia writes of her new life in school:

"Now I am in a school with many friends.
I never see them cry,
They say, Let's play a game!
Let's just sit and talk!
Talking makes me so happy.

Writing and reading also make me happy,
And so does taking pictures at school.
School is my life now
I am learning and growing,
And finding ways to be happy."

"life is a race--try to win
life is an exam--try to pass and be happy
life is a river--try to find treasure
life is gold--try to give to others
life is a box of treasure--try to open it and find the way of life
life is like paper--try to write memories of happy days
life is like time--try to use it in good ways"

Please take some time to click through and leave a response for the writers. They enjoy very much hearing from readers all over the world. Check back often for we publish new work every week. As we move towards 2014, and we contemplate US and international roles in Afghanistan, please do not forget these girls, please o not forget how much they have to give to their society and to the world.]]>